The United States, mistakenly believing that neither the U-2 nor the pilot could survive the fall from the altitudes at which it was flying, responded with a clumsy cover story about a weather plane that had wandered off course.The cover story was demolished on May 7: “We have parts of the plane,” Khrushchev revealed. Confimation came May 5 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that the USSR had shot down a US spy plane. US officials had no clue as to what had happened, but realized that Powers must have gone down somewhere in the Soviet Union. After that, he was on strict radio silence.īy late afternoon, he had not arrived in Norway. He used a single click of his radio switch to indicate no problem that would preclude flying the mission as planned. Approaching the Soviet border, he reached penetration altitude of 66,000 feet.
Powers took off and headed northwest, across the Hindu Kush mountain range. The May Day mission was to be the first complete transit of the Soviet Union, a nine-hour flight of some 3,800 miles from Pakistan to Bodo on the northern coast of Norway. Each of the previous operations had been a partial overflight, going in for a limited distance, then returning by the same route. The CIA’s U-2s had previously penetrated Soviet airspace 25 times, but this time was different. local time from the White House in Washington, D.C. In the cockpit was Francis Gary Powers, the most experienced of the Central Intelligence Agency’s U-2 pilots, awaiting the specific order to launch. Takeoff would be soon after daybreak to reduce the chance it would be seen by curious local observers. It had been flown in the night before by a ferry pilot and would remain on the ground for only a few hours. The mysterious U-2 on the corner of the airfield at Peshawar, Pakistan, the morning of May 1, 1960, had no markings or insignia. Pilot Frances Gary Powers was not at fault-but it took decades for some in the public to accept that. When a U-2C crashed on a spy mission over the Soviet Union in 1960, the United States tried to cover up the incident.
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